This project is made with data from the General Social Survey.

While the General Social Survey is not a panel survey, it is both a very long-running survey and one with a large and diverse set of participants. And while the survey contains nearly no personally identifying information, some basic demographic information is included in the data which may be interesting. Because both “age of respondent” and “year of survey” are provided, for example, some basic manipulation of the data gets it to a place where we can use birth year as a unit of analysis, and the data begins to resemble time-series data in the aggregate.

For the sake of sample size, I created a

A screenshot of an excel sheet of sample sizes. Acceptably large cohorts are highlighted to demonstrate the ‘shape’ of the available data.

A screenshot of an excel sheet of sample sizes. Acceptably large cohorts are highlighted to demonstrate the ‘shape’ of the available data.

The motivating question for this project was initially this: Do we get more conservative as we get older?

That’s the sort of thing that seems to be common knowledge, anyway, with the line “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head” often being quoted (and misattributed to Winston Churchill) by conservatives. But in 2014 The Upshot blog at the New York Times presented a theory of “formative events” shaping the political beliefs of generations, which remain stable over time. Further, it could be that people’s views actually don’t change that much, but are perceived as more conservative to newer generations which are increasingly liberal.

To test this I took the five-year birth cohort bins and plotted the mean of their answers to the “Political Views” question, which indicates the respodent’s self-evaluated place on a seven point scale traveling between “Very Liberal” (1), “Moderate” (4) and “Very Conservative” (7). These evaluations are fairly coherent and consistent in terms of their meaning. The overall trend line is presented in black.

Well, that seems pretty straightforward, just looking at it.

That individuals are self-reporting a greater rate of conservatism as the move further along in life likely means one of two things: One, people change their beliefs over time and actually do get more conservative, or two, somewhat less likely in my opinion, people as they get older perceive the world around them as shifting leftwards. That is, the same set of views that would have been called liberal in 1980 are conservative in 2010, and people holding those views recognize that.

But I did notice something interesting poking around this chart: the youngest age cohorts - as of the 2018 survey - are liberal compared to previous generations. Here’s the same data as above, presented as scatterplot and with the 2018 survey results highlighted:

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